Romain Leclerq Discusses: The 2006 Turner Prize Nominees

Good morrow, dear comrades.

It is I, Romain Leclerq, and the time has come again. The date is 16th May 2006 and the saucer it sits upon is the Turner Prize, which is to Art as a sailor is to a shanty. I, your omnipresent portal into the shadowy world of art, shall take you firmly by the balls and lead you as a man leads a wife, through the ever-present pitfalls of artistry. I shall allow the seminal works by these great artists to fill your mind until it tips over and you must leave, leaking art from every orifice. You may well be bested by Art, yet you may still collar the beast for a moment, and allow it to masturbate culture down your throat like a thirteen year old schoolboy left alone in a house with the Playboy channel.

2006 sees the reunion of Art with life and life with Cheltenham. Four gladiators of the palette wield paintbrushes of destiny as they battle with closed eyes and beaten hearts. I shall reveal them all to you, dear readers, and their genius shall be put onto a place, covered with Clingfilm, microwaved for five minutes and served with a side salad and glass of Chablis for you to consume as you wish.

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1) Tomma Abts

Tomma Abts, dropped into this world by a passing miracle, though conversely by the cruellest mix of fate, landed in Hamburg, is at the front-running of a new sect of visual Artists, and is the first Ultra-Falsetto-Povoco-Grosse artist to leave the ghettos of Warsaw and seek meaning and truancy in the school of life. Her artwork sings to your soul, but the chords it sings are minor in key, and so low as to cause involuntary weeping amongst the very young or foolish. It cannot hurt you, yet it pulls at your heart strings like two members of a cataclysmic Olympic relay team pull at the baton, each certain the other holds the weight, each full of goodwill but inevitably the baton ends dropped, and a nations dreams lay shattered on the floor. Abts work leaves you exhausted, and barely able to continue on yet continue on we must, and we pray that we might find solace, as one finds a Little Chef, at the ext petrol station of existence.

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2) Mark Titchner

Titcher has risen from the long dead carcass of his art career. He was written off by most; indeed, I disregarded him like I disregarded a beret covered in ice cream and magnets. His work revolved around a little known school of Art, one based in the Irish town of Cork, and one deploying the mediums of glass, light, fur and Mary J. Blige. Titchner stuck to the school of Glassica, even though his deputies left him one by one and eventually the school collapsed under the weight of arrogance. But Titcher is back, with a developed style. We don't see his clever use of glass anymore, instead, he has replaced with translucent plastics - a move so uncannily French, so amusingly retreative that it has turned the Art world upside-down like a salt shaker with us cowering inside, and now he is ready to liberally deposit us all over his Saveloy and Strawberry jam Scones, which nestle between his teats the same was as a mother keeps her remorseless lies ready to be delivered to the ever-willing ears of a child. And we must sup on his teats, and the milk that emits from them is warming and full of hope and sunshine. Titchner has swallowed our optimistic cares whole and has farted them back out into the world in a selection of iced Art biscuits. We take them and dunk them into the tea of wonderment and bedazzlement until their structure is waterlogged with the limitless possibilities of Art.

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3) Rebecca Warren

Sprouting brilliance amongst murky enthusiasm is the sculpting of Rebecca Warren. Rebecca Warren is an enigma, a code, a puzzle created by a ten year old idiot savant fed on a diet of pills and Hulk Hogan. Warren's sculpting is softer than a rock covered in foam stapled to the skin of a boy washed with fairy liquid, yet it exudes a hardness the like of which has not been seen in recent years. The hardness of a life spent grovelling for change in the wretched streets of Bedford. One can only gape at the sights Warren saw there, and how those sights must have been absorbed into her, and thus manifest into her craggy visage and craggier artwork. Warren is a fighter, a lover, a warrior, a miner, a mother and father. Warren is all of these things, yet there remains space in her crowded soul for love and life to flow forth, though it is tempered by a fiery rage, which expands like a rapidly growing Afro. Warren is the favourite for the prize, the favourite to clasp the sweaty cup of Turner, the favourite to quaff from its magnificence and turn the waste into art.

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4) Phil Collins

The barefaced cheek of Phil Collins is felt like a rectal half bared to the biting wind of an arctic gale. Collins, former drummer, former pop idol, former state of wretchedness paraded around the western world, former Bob Hoskins look-alike has blown forth into this alternate universe of shapes, colours, sounds and STDs like a cheap hooker stalling for time. Collins has provided the art world with an injection of wit and idiocy. Collins artistry, drawn childishly onto the backs of passing cars, outlined with gold and tossed into the air like confetti at the wedding of a dominatrix has shocked us all and continues to shock even in this flaccid age of apathy and ingenuity. His broad use of Art is appealing to the masses, yet it has a slightly contagious illness, and that illness has spread like head lice in a crowded school playing field. It is a shocking repost to what we believe in, and a hidden promise of endless dreams for what we don't. It offers us a future, a future filled to the brim with orange juice and fake bacon pieces, but it is a future only for those brave enough to take the step over the precipice. It is a bold faced insult to cowardice, but cower we must, for who are we to challenge the future and leave it panting like a dog who has seen his master run away with the remainder of the Pedigree Chum? Who indeed.

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And there we are my friends, the four horsemen of the artpocalypse. The famed, fated four who shall battle with drawn swords and faces, coloured in by a psychotic minstrel who flourishes the Crayolas of death and warfare. The four above, these banner men, these avatars for culture must battle the minstrel until but one is left, and the one left standing will hold the trophy in their eager hands. The medal. The grail. The Turner Prize. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been inspiring. I have been Romain Leclerq and I have deposited art into your soulless bodies like a dog deposits the clinging earth onto his bone. You have been buried in art. You are lucky. Good afternoon.

Romain Leclerq: The 2005 Turner Prize Review

This discussion of the three finalists for the Turner Prize was originally published in October 2005. It appeared in the esteemed News Skim and an abridged version was published in the Quarterly Art Review journal, "Art".

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Hallo. I am Romain Leclerq and you join me as the world teeters over a vast, swathing sea of controversy. The art world is about to be turned on it's head, the eyebrows will arch like an Olympic polevaultist and that omnipresent question "what the fuck is that?" will be asked of the art world yet again. Yes, dear friends, for the Turner Prize has crept up behind us and is poised to pounce, like the voracious tiger of the African prairie, full of surprise, strange beauty and sharp pointy teeth.

The Turner is now down to three finalists, three works of art created by three human beings, all charging towards the prize like an out of control car powered by smugness and talent:

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1. "Le Dossier, La Douche Et La Petite Cadeau Pour La Grand Cadeau" (The folder, the shower and the little present for the big present)

by Alain Merlot

Firstly, I would like to present unto the world, my award-winning fellow Frenchman, Alain Merlot, that most gifted and enigmatic of the latest posse of Nouveau-Pastiche-Amaretto-Faux artists to emerge from the sun-drenched port of Marseilles.

Tortured soul, lost eyes and runny faeces, all wrapped up in a conundrum contained within a decoy, shelled into a corner by a joke and then patted on the head by a whimsy. Alain Merlot has truly asked the biggest of questions with this scintillating, provoking piece. Here, by the exact placement of the fez within the pram, Alain asks us, the sausage-eating and cravat-wearing public, 'Where do I come from?' But the question is twisted, returned and fired out twice as hard by the garish leopard skin print of the fez. And as we reel from this double blow, a third thought empties upon us like an enema from the heavens. "Where do I go from here that isn't a week last Tuesday?" And lest we forget, all decisions made are watched, hawk-like, by the rabbit, crouched like a water closet filled with dark matter, beneath this most fearsome of prams. And the answer to these dark, mirthful questions? It is nowhere and everywhere. Yes, a truly awesome stroke of genius by Merlot. A favourite, a mistress, a persona grata.

2. "Quack"

by Boris Odessa.

"The second piece, a flaming retort against everything you and I stand for, is by Boris Odessa, a ground breaking and wall shattering Left Wrong Flopsie artist from Tbilisi.

The harsh lines, the stark white, the glint of gold, the promise of pleasure mixed with pain, the time has emerged and it has been placed in a box in the corner and forgotten about. The callous laugh, the muted sigh, the wretched fervour of the defrocked priest. What more can one painting offer? The imagination shrinks at the possibilities offered by this piece by professional pie-eater Odessa. This piece reeks of the filth Odessa saw on the streets of Tbilisi as a small boy lost in a sea of men. Was it a past glory, or long forgotten shame that subconsciously guided Odessa's skilled hand across the flappy contours of the canvas? Who knows? Who cares? I for one do not. I just want to admire and weep.

3. "Granny's Seven Inch Long Wish List"

by Angus McLeod.

"The third piece has swung forth from obscurity like a ham thrown to an indifferent spaniel by the burly and manly brawn of Scotsman Angus McLeod.

Haunted? Hunted? Hounded? None of these fit, yet the mind is pulled towards their beguiling charms. This is the eternal war, of muscle squaring off against intelligence, on a table-tennis table of gloom and warmongering. Will the grizzly visage of Eddy Guerrero, former WWE World Cruiserweight Champion and Latino Heat Hero defeat the coldly Socialist visage of Karl Marx? What could be more perfect than the eternal and damning struggle between these two colossusi? These stalwart defenders of two completely different though eerily similar pillars of life? Look at the intensity of the struggle, the slight tilt and determination of Eddy as his eyes turn away from the icy stare of a long dead proto-communist. Does Eddy fear death? Fear life? Fear a life under the power of a Workingman's Union? McLeod brilliantly sums this feeling of heart-rending terror and mutual man love up with room to spare for tea and scones and a nice pot of gin. This, Gentleladies and Men is the past, the future and the present, rolled up into one, and if you are brave enough to look deeper, you might catch a glimpse into every man's soul. A wonderful moment of clarity, spoiled by the capricious saucer of inevitability. Tremendous.

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And those are the three musketeers of modern art, swashbuckling to the death with the Turner as their spoils. But that was then, this is now, tomorrow has been wearing a coat since Sunday and next week has leapt into my mother's bed and taken all the sheets. I have been Romain Leclerq, you have been amazed, our minds have been opened and Art has filled them like cannons firing wafers into the moon. Good day.